First, I confess I hadn't fully thought through how to map the various heroes and villains of ‘Kill the Hobbit’ back onto ‘The Hobbit.’ But on reflection, this drawing seems a bit off. In my version of the story, the hobbit is the villain, stealing gold from the people of New Zealand (I guess to take back to Hollywoodshire?) This would make Smaug the dragon the public, and Smaug’s giant pile of gold the commonwealth (that’s why it’s so large). Smaug should be casting the Expecto Patronum (EP) spell to banish the Hobbit, not the other way around.

But hey, people may see it differently, and their right to publish those perspectives on our common culture is part of what’s at stake in ‘Kill the Hobbit to Save Regular Earth’ (pivoting here to New Zealand’s support for the IP-enforcement-on-steroids Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement).

So with that in mind, I am happy to announce the ‘Kill the Hobbit to Save Regular Earth’ Initiative– KH2SREI for short (pronounced Kisstory, after the ancient Elven admonition to beware Hobbits bringing gifts).

I invite you to flesh out the Kisstory allegory in whatever direction makes most sense to you. If you send me pictures, I will publish them here (as long as they are not obscene or gratuitously nasty). I will even try to talk the good people at Bloomberg View into running them. And if we get enough submissions we will have a public vote to award copies of the “semi-epic” Media Piracy in Emerging Economies to the two most worthy entries (plus whatever other awards we can accumulate in the meantime.)

As for those "other awards", we're throwing a Techdirt t-shirt into the mix. So if you're a creator, whatever your medium, we hope you'll submit something! Head on over to the contest page for more details and some "extra points" guidelines, including a "Special award for the best pro-Hobbit, pro TPPA, pro Warner Bros art, if we get any" because hey, political cartoons can cut both ways.

I'm sure if we likened the **AA organizations of the world as Sauron pouring his might into crafting The One Ring (read: copyright extensions, fighting "piracy" of those damned immortal elves, etc.), and its inevitable fall (read: failing of their business model) where Mt. Doom turns out to be The Internet...

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No, no, the intertubes is Galadriel's mirror! I'd say his interpretation is accurate in a sense (hobbit the villain, Smaug the public with its Public Domain treasure) BUT you could see the hobbit as the people (small and powerless against the great corporations robbery) in a quest to recover their treasure much like in LOTR. They are small things in the middle of great powers but in the end they are the ones driving the fall of Sauron (the MAFIAA).

Good lord and Tolkien says in the book he did not intend to make any allegory...

regardless of the success or not of this little project, the ones that should be lambasted and take notice of what this is really about, ie Hollywood and the other entertainment industries continuous whining about losing, losing, losing, while being given millions, millions, millions under false pretenses, will totally ignore it!